29 August 2016

To Hell in a Handcart or Better All The Time?

In recent months the world, as we know it, seems to be going
to hell in a handcart. This year has
seen planes fall out of the sky, people attacked while at prayer, relaxation or
dance and innocent civilians in Syria still caught in the middle of a morass of
warring forces. Of course there has been
good news, the Brexit vote, so hotly contested, went the way I wanted it to and
Britain can now look forward to a truly prosperous global future as opposed to
being shackled to an outmoded anti-democratic, overly bureaucratic and economy
stifling club of merely European nations. (I hope our future will continue to
allow a rich trade with our European neighbours while opening the door to the
rest of the world). Even this high point
has come at a cost. Doom mongers are
talking down the post Brexit economy so vehemently that they risk causing the
very problems they talk about,
disgruntled remainers have spoken, quite openly, about their desire to
set aside the democratic process and repeal the vote. People who supported the vote to leave have
been cast as racist, stupid and bullies.
Some people I know have been marginalised by their ‘friends’ simply
because of how they voted. Suddenly the
understated yet powerful democracy of my adopted country of Britain, which I
hold so dear seems to be very fragile. Hopefully the process will be started soon and we can start to negotiate our new place in the world.

I have been thinking about these things quite a lot in
recent days for a number of reasons. Firstly
because the older children are now starting to read and watch a lot more news
and asking questions about what is going on (if any one can point me to a
neutral analysis of the American elections aimed at under 10s I would be most
grateful). This lends an extra depth to
the discussions Mr EE and I have.
Secondly it is around the time of our wedding anniversary and, while we
don’t celebrate it as such it is a time of the year when, much like New Year, I
reflect on what has gone and what is yet to come. While we met 20 years ago we have only been
married for 15 as we wanted to both finish our education and on the job
training before getting married. Our
wedding was just one month before the September 11 attacks. Watching a drama set in 1914 with an older
relative he told me that he often remembers the celebration of our wedding the
way the WW1 generation remembered the gilded summer of 1914, the last gasp of a
vanishing era.

The last gasp of a glittering era?

I dismissed that at first but the more I think about it the
more right I realise he is. Mr EE and I
remember the final years of the tangible nuclear threat (Mr EE a little more
than I do, he remembers duck and cover, I know it only from stories). More secure in my memories are the
tri-partite summits, watching Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev find their way
towards a peace our parents had worried would never exist. I visited Russia (Leningrad and Moscow) just
one year before the USSR disappeared forever (and little did we think, as children of the end of the Cold War that we would live in and be welcomed to the Kazakh Steppes).
We saw the wall come down, we saw the Good Friday Agreement set the
stage for peace in Northern Ireland and the end of the Iran/Iraq war. To be fair we also saw events unfold in
Mogadishu and the First Iraq war which today seem to presage the awful state
the world is in today, at the time they seemed, to us at least, distant in the
case of the first and a one off in the case of the second. We also saw, heartbreakingly, the return of
concentration camps in Europe and Rwanda but awful as they
were, the conflicts were small in geographic scale and were resolved, things
were on the up around the world. It
seemed to us that we were starting out on our life’s adventure blessed with a
world as at peace as it was ever going to be and things looked pretty golden.

That all changed on September 11. Like everyone else we remember exactly where
we were when the news broke; Mr EE was in school and spent the rest of that and
subsequent days caring for a boarder who thought his mother was in the WTC at
the time of the hit (thank God she was late for work that morning and we got
news she was safe a few days later). I
was in my office, my second day as a qualified solicitor, I remember the staff
from our Lloyds branch were evacuated to our building and, given my 1 ½ hour
commute home on London’s creaky rail network, many colleagues kindly offered me
accommodation for the night. We all
tried to be hard bitten City lawyers and continue with our work but minute by
minute we stopped all but the most essential work and started to try to contact
family and friends in the US, moving into each other’s rooms to watch the
footage unfold, each scene more horrifying than the last. As the days went by it became obvious that
the attack was as pivotal as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914, our
world had lurched on its axis and nothing would ever be the same again.

Instead of the better world we all took for granted on the
day of our wedding, instead of the single, definable, bogeyman of our parent’s
generation we now have to bring our children up in a real life version of a
Hitchcock thriller. We can’t see or plan
for the threat, it just materialises. Nowhere
is safe, not a shopping centre in Germany a restaurant in Dhaka, a street in
Almaty, a promenade in Nice, the streets
of Kabul (ok they are not safe at any time but recent events were a whole
magnitude of awful more), not the
Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah or a church in Normandy. It is not just extremist violence we need to be concerned about either, Zika, Ebola, extremist politics on both the left and right in many stable democracies and interest rates edging towards 0 or even negative. Everywhere we look the news seems resolutely depressing.

Because of our connections to multiple countries expats are
far more exposed to events than others. I
keep an eye on the news from all the countries I have lived in. When I see footage of shootings in Almaty I
know the streets, when I hear of Venezuelans reduced to such straits by the
happenings in their country that they are forced to eat zoo animals, those
people were my neighbours. The families
caught in the bombings in south east Turkey were my family and friends 20 years
ago. When MH17 was shot down there were people from our community, including a parent from my husband's school on board. I am not unusual, many expats feel
this way and there are days when the news hurts. Our children are more exposed as well and it
is important to teach them skills to cope with the awful news stories they will
see or hear.

Things are bad, there are many evil people in the world but
in many ways things are so much better and getting better all the time. Polio is almost eradicated, a second victory
for humanity in its fight against disease. True there has been an
outbreak in Nigeria in recent weeks but the authorities seem to be working
valiantly isolate it, the system works!
When I lived in Nigeria in the 1980s polio sufferers were a common
sight, particularly in orphanages. To
know that soon people will no longer suffer that disease is cause for
celebration. We may be struggling with Zika but just recently the world helped some of the poorest countries to deal with a potentially devastating Ebola outbreak. The lessons learned will ensure that when the disease breaks out again, it can be contained more efficiently.

Today more people have
access to clean water than ever before (although that is not to say that things
could not improve). More people can
read, thanks to GMOs we are looking at being in a position where more and more
countries will be able to guarantee a stable food supply. The rights of minorities (and of women) are
more entrenched and more protected in more places than when I was a child. When a depraved man drove a bus into a crowd of innocent people there were others, people who woke up never thinking they could be or would be called to be heroic, who did not hesitate to try to stop him. When an earthquake hit an Italian village late at night a young girl used her body to shield her sister, to give her sibling a chance at life a the cost of her own. The news may not make it seem that way but there is more peace and more stability in the world than at just about any other time in human history.

So we live our lives, different lives to the ones we
expected 15 years ago, but nevertheless lucky, happy, enjoyable lives. The world may be going to hell in a handcart
but it is our world and there is still more good in it than bad, more heroism
than cowardice and more opportunity than not. As the year turns we will hold on to that.

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About Me

I am a no longer 30 something global soul, a perpetual expat. I was born in the Netherlands to a Dutch/Irish Family. Since then I have lived in Norway, Nigeria, Turkey and Venezuela. I went to school and university in the UK. We decided to have an adventure and took our children and the dog(s) to live abroad, first to Kazakhstan and then to various locations in Malaysia. Our current home is in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
This blog is about how we muddle through daily life as expats and how things have changed from the adventures of my childhood.